THE PROTAGONIST

I finally started the daunting task of writing a draft of my first chapter for my PhD and ended up writing quite a bit about John Kilduff’s Let’s Paint TV which will no doubt be scrapped eventually. Embrace failare buddy! 

The initial inspiration for The O Show was John Kilduff's Let's Paint TV which ran from 2002 to 2008 as a public access show in Los Angeles and ended up as a daily spot on stickam.com, a website that enables interactive broadcasting via webcam and chat rooms. Kilduff’s show entails him running on a treadmill, blending mixed drinks, painting canvases and answering calls from random members of the public; all performed in front of a blue screen which shows alternative angles, such as close-ups of what he’s painting or cooking, adding another level of visual chaos. It looks sort of like something you would expect to find on US daytime television – a combination of Bob Ross and exercise infomercial, but on acid. 
 

 The early episodes were very much about testing John’s multitasking abilities or lack thereof, seeing how many activities he could do (or not) simultaneously, adding things like interviewing special guests and playing chess on top of his usual mix of activities. Each episode played with form and content; for example, one episode shows John playing table tennis with the invisible man (a man draped in fabric so that blue screen special effects could wipe away all but his sun-glasses and ping pong paddle). Kilduff’s experimentation with materials/technology and his gift for delivering an amusing, at times absurd, at times profound, oratory play-by-play fuelled the series and earned him a place in both LA counter-culture and UCLA’s highly competitive Masters in Fine Art programme. With the advent of the internet, his videos went viral and gained an international audience; some of his youtube clips have had more than a million views. The more recent stickam episodes which are filmed at his home in The Valley, have a much more DIY aesthetic and are geared towards interacting with his dispersed but committed, web-based community of fans who chat in the stickam chat room.

Day after day, episode after episode, Kilduff espouses the benefits of creativity, perseverance and “embracing failare” [sic], but Let’s Paint TV viewers are divided about whether or not his preaching is ironic or heartfelt. I would argue that it’s the mixture of both that allows their identification and keeps them coming back for more. Critic Doug Harvey describes it aptly: “[b]oisterous, irreverent and surreal, Let’s Paint TV is nevertheless utterly sincere in its espousal of painting as a path of creative liberation’, although I might substitute the word ‘painting’ for ‘multitasking’ or maybe even ‘play’.

Let's Paint TV can be analysed as an example of post-modern parody, especially the cable-access episodes; using absurdity and irony, Kilduff critiques the values of perfectionism and consumerism espoused within US daytime TV programming. On one level, Let’s Paint TV repeats the conventions of the infomercial with the critical difference being that the balding, out-of-breath Kilduff replaces the coherent, attractive and aspirational figure of the salesperson. John is the ultimate ‘everyman’, someone who viewers identify with perhaps more readily and intimately than they would the sun-tanned, muscle-toned body trying to sell them the latest exercise gadget. On another level, the show places itself at the end of a lineage of hobbyist, how-to painting shows, with the critical difference between John Kilduff and Bob Ross being that Ross demonstrates a certain level of skill that can be copied, a fact made all the more poignant because the main message of Let’s Paint TV is to be yourself.[1] 

 

My mom sent me an article this morning which lead me to click on this relatively recent interview with Gloria Steinem. I was intrigued by the the host Marlo's nose-job and the rinky-dink set-up of this low-fi chat show. Maybe there's a model for 'The O Show' here. Also of interest is Steinem's 1992 book Revolution from Within: A Book of Self Esteem which has "passages that come dangerously close to the banalities and pseudo-spiritualism of the self-help manual". Sounds like a must-read.

Notes:

Denes, M., 2005, 'Feminism? It's hardly begun', The Guardian, 17 January.

 

 

In my version, I will maintain the format of the original, beginning with a monologue about my experiences in life and therapy which will be in part a parody of Somers’ speech and in part revelatory of my life. This will be filmed in park locations in New York and London and edited together so as to create the illusion that I am seamlessly strolling through these geographically distant environments. The self-help experts of Somercise will be replaced with my psychologist-parents and the therapists who I have had throughout my life. My divorced parents will give their opinions on what it takes to have healthy loving relationships. My current therapist Bernadette Ainsworth, who practices Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (R.E.B.T.) will address the myth of self-esteem. The psychoanalytic therapist I saw throughout high school has declined being in the film because she needs to maintain her anonymity. Since meeting with her for research purposes I have scripted the scene of our re-acquaintance and will dramatise this with my therapist played by an actress. 

By simultaneously playing into and confounding the stereotypes of the ‘self-help guru’ my aim with this piece is to dispel the notion of the mythically self-assured, autonomous subject that underpins so much self-help advice. I am interested in illuminating the perspective of a modern psychoanalytic therapist on this subject especially in terms of the concept of the unconscious. Likewise, it will be useful to address the R.E.B.T. perspective on self-determination, particularly in light of the fact that accepting one’s fallibility and imperfection as a human being is so fundamental to its philosophy. I hope that the overall message of the film will be thought-provoking and positive in its realism while at the same time comedic in its parodic elements. 

I guess I'm on an exercise kick these days. So my role model this week is an award winning actress, a great singer and someone who in her own words is 'naturally good at her body'.

I arrived in Scarborough yesterday to do a teaching residency with Theatre and Performance Students at The University of Hull. As a result of this residency, on Friday 25 March at 7.30pm I will be performing alongside my 7 new students in a professional collaborative piece. The pressure is on.

Yesterday during the first session, to get them inspired I shared my story of personal transformation from a shy and mousy painter to the confident and poised performance artist I am today. Then, following in the footsteps of consciousness raising sessions and group therapy, we sat around and shared stories, expectations and concerns about the workshop days to come. Because I believe strongly in physical as well as emotional wellbeing and the connection between the two, we also did some folk dancing and aerobic exercise. We listened to the words from Cher in this clip and felt as if she was in the room with us. Her energy fueled our steps as I lead the students through a series of hot dance moves including the hitchhiker, the swim and my personal favourite, the roger rabbit. That was the best part of the day for me.

The workshop was an intensive 6-hour session and this cardio-routine provided the necessary endorphins to plow through the second half of the day. I delivered a slide-show presentation of 5 works of performance art from the 1960s to today. The students then had to come up with ways to re-enact each of the performances by changing any number of elements such as the identity of the peformer, the props used, the context in which it is performed, the intended audience(s) and the media employed with which to document and/or disseminate it. They came up with some really thought-provoking ideas. It's my job to enable them to continue in that direction in another 6 hour session today. Wish me luck!

Went to see the Susan Hiller show at Tate Britain today and found it really inspiring. The above piece was probably my favourite in the show and possibly the most overtly feminist and autobiographical in the exhibition. She took pictures of her belly ever day over the course of her pregnancy, the form abstracted to look like the moon. She also wrote a diary of her emotional experiences and each lunar month of photos was accompanied by a short statement. The above statement reads:

She speaks (as a woman) about everything, although they wish her to speak about only women's things. They like her to speak about everything but only if she does not 'speak as a woman', only if she will agree in advance to play the artist's role as neutral (neuter) observer.
She does not speak (as a woman) about anything, although they want her to. There is nothing she can speak of 'as a woman'. As a woman, she cannot speak.

This piece and indeed her work as a whole strikes an elegant balance between speaking 'as a woman' and speaking as 'the artist' or 'neutral observer'. This piece is also, however not truly indicative of her oeuvre. Most of her artwork does not deal overtly with the representation of women or gender identity. The fact that feminism is only hinted at in her work does not suggest to me that she is avoiding the label, but rather in my opinion it is 'feminist' of her not to make these concerns the central guiding force behind her work. At the same time, this is what separates her from many women artists of her generation who whole-heartedly take up the label of 'feminist artist' and have made their identities as women the focus of all that they produce. To clarify, she investigates her interests as anyone might do regardless of their identity, but her identity is still present in the work and makes itself known in a 'natural' (for lack of a better word) way, it isn't forced. I read feminism into her concern for the marginal, for the lost and nearly forgotten and into her persistent attempts to illuminate and explain the mysterious and the unconscious.